I had a hard time finding an image that I loved for this, but not for obvious reasons. Those of you who know me know that I absolutely love astrophotography and I have hundreds (seriously) of images of various Milky Way parts, lunar phases, star clusters, you name it I have loved it through a lens. But for some reason I didn’t feel like I was making any movement if I just used one of those.

So instead is this. This is a night church session in Tulum, Mexico. I’m honestly not even sure if this image is beautiful or not, and I know that sounds silly. But I feel like it is apt because I am overwhelmed by the memory of the feeling of capturing it every time I see it and it blinds me to it.

Immediately adjacent to this is a huge community center, completely awash in an entire city’s worth of play and vendor hustle. Every time you look somewhere new you are drawn to an impromptu game, or children laughing and riding, the overwhelming smells of fried street food, or a COMPLETELY UNNATURAL AMOUNT OF ABSOLUTELY DEAFENING RAVENS (for real if you have never been here, it is like “Planet Earth with David Attenborough” levels of spectacle). But despite all of that a silence pulled me away, like the feeling of someone watching you. There was a void of noise coming from somewhere and as I turned to see I fell into this. A silent night church. The quiet of people trying to see something invisible, gathered together for some sort of amplification. A strange kind of quiet that I can still feel at random times in the chaos of life. So I’ll say it again: I don’t know if this is a good image, but it is some kind of haunting and I think that is beautiful.